Parents pass the hat to make up for school cuts

This July 13, 2009 photo shows Rachael Bouma and her son Henry, 6, posing for photos outside Lowell Elementary School in Tacoma, Wash., where Henry attended kindergarten last year. When Bouma heard that the Tacoma School District was short of cash to pay for kindergarten classroom aides, she helped organize a fundraiser to pay for aides for each of Lowell Elementary's three kindergarten classrooms, raising a total of $16,000. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
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This July 13, 2009 photo shows Rachael Bouma and her son Henry, 6, posing for photos outside Lowell Elementary School in Tacoma, Wash., where Henry attended kindergarten last year. When Bouma heard that the Tacoma School District was short of cash to pay for kindergarten classroom aides, she helped organize a fundraiser to pay for aides for each of Lowell Elementary's three kindergarten classrooms, raising a total of $16,000. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
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The national PTA does not encourage parents to raise money for teacher salaries, fearing that school systems will come to depend on such fundraising year after year. Instead, the group wants parents to get more involved in lobbying state lawmakers.

In New York City during the past school year, 18 of the city's 1,500 schools had nearly 200 teachers and aides who had been hired directly by parent groups, even though the school system banned such under-the-table hiring in the mid-1990s.

The teachers union filed a grievance after it discovered some of the hires were being paid less than union members. The district gave principals until the end of the school year to fix the problem.

Some fear that relying on parents' generosity could leave poor districts even further behind. These districts do not have the well-to-do residents, the big property tax bases or the successful local businesses that wealthier communities have.

"That makes these communities and the schools in them more fragile, and it hurts them most when programs are cut and teachers are laid off," said Daria Hall, director of K-12 policy for the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization.

Even in some upper-middle class areas, parents know they can't possibly make up for the money lost.

Justine Fischer, PTSA president at Thousand Oaks High School, said that when business was booming in her Los Angeles-area community, parents could raise as much as $12,000 a year to buy software for the library, pay for a drunken-driving awareness program and support other programs.

But with layoffs hitting the community's biggest employers, the PTSA has set a more modest goal for the coming school year of $3,000 in cash donations, Fischer said.